"Jacob, wake up. It's 8:00 am," Blake's voice was like a tuba blasting in Jacob's ears.
The blind flipped up and searing sunlight filled the dorm.
Jacob groaned and rolled closer to the wall, squeezing his eyes shut. "I'm not going. Let me sleep."
"You sure?" Blake asked.
"Ungh..." Grog covered his brain. If he spoke any more it would actually wake him up.
"Alright, buddy, I'll take notes."
Jacob pulled his covers over his head as Blake got ready. He lay there in a half-conscious trance, his only cogent thought that he regretted ever being awake.
Blake moved around for a bit, gathering his things. Then the door creaked open and clicked shut softly.
Peace and quiet, apart from the bumps and muttered conversation coming from nearby dorm rooms, and the patter of feet outside.
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Jacob sat up suddenly, his covers falling off of him. Midday sunlight streamed in through the window, throwing a rectangular patch of light on the wall above his bed.
He rubbed a hand down his face and checked his phone. It was past 10am. Christ, he couldn't remember the last time he'd slept in this late.
"Ugh..." He couldn't believe he had just skipped Production Basics like that. His parents would not be happy.
He blinked and went to move out of bed. His joints groaned, his muscles screamed.
Well, he was paying the price for all that training yesterday. He supposed you couldn't just exert yourself that much without it coming back to haunt you.
He stood on shaky feet , and began the automatic process of showering and dressing as quickly as he could. The dorm was silent, the showers empty. Everyone was probably at Production Basics. Was he really skipping classes to sleep? It was one thing to skip Intro because of the killer. This, however, was just laziness.
He stood in front of the room-length mirror that hung over the trough-like sink, brushing his teeth, staring at his exhausted face. He realized that his parents wouldn't know he was skipping class, that the profs seemed hardly to care. They didn't even take attendance. Archie skipped all the time. Grace skipped out of pure laziness.
No one cared that he had skipped. No one but him.
He laughed at himself in the mirror.
"Moron."
He laughed again, spitting his toothpaste out into the trough, and looked around the empty bathroom. He kind of liked having the whole place to himself. He went in the shower and turned it all the way to hot and stood under it for as long as he could bear. No one else was using the hot water right now, so he could have as much as he wanted.
The day stretched before him. Until Brother Bondar found evidence of the Ritual Magic, there wasn't anything him, Camilla, and Tanaka could really do about it, which meant it was time to focus on other things. He wasn't sure if the prospect of training as hard as he had the day excited him or made him want to groan. A bit of both. But the impending fight with Archie and the silent surety that the other boy was hard at work spurred him into action regardless of how he felt.
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He ambled back to his dorm room. His phone had filled up with messages from his mom, asking how he was, things like: How is the camp? Have you used your first-aid kit yet? How many animals have you seen? Are the other kids friendly? Is the nature making you allergic? Did you remember your medication?
For a brief moment he had no idea what she was talking about, then remembered his cover story of going to a biology camp in Kelowna to study local ecosystems.
The idea of dutifully exploring a cordoned off section of forest with a bunch of other ecology nerds, under the supervision of some scientist made him laugh so hard if Blake walked in to their room right now the boy would think he'd lost his marbles. It wasn't that a camp like that was goofy or anything, but just in comparison to where he actually was, what he was actually doing, it didn't seem real.
Had he used his first-aid kit yet? Good Lord. Maybe he should have broken that out against Altman, or Wilkins. No, wait, next match would be perfect!
Jacob broke into fresh peals of laughter. Not quite, mom. Not quite.
He was glad for the cover story. He couldn't imagine how they'd react to where he was and what he was doing. Not to mention the killer on campus, the attack on the Menagerie, the injuries sustained in the Tournament.
A biology camp, studying ecosystems. The idea transported him to Kelowna, to the woods in the mountains. God, that would have been cool. Actually getting out in nature and seeing how ecosystems worked in person. Would he rather be doing that? In some ways, maybe, but he didn't think it was really comparable. That felt like something fun, something to do during the hot summer months. This was... well, it was school.
He'd barely touched his fantasy books, and after the first week he hadn't watched a single nature doc while here at Tisdale. He'd been too busy with classes, studying, hanging with friends, managing living on his own, but more than that, he just hadn't thought about any of it. The only time he'd really engaged with ecology while at Tisdale was with the club, and that was all related to magic. Was this how Camilla felt back at high school, split between worlds?
Jacob went and sat next to the dorm room's little window and looked out at the campus, forlorn.
He'd been away from home for two months. He wondered how his parents were doing, what his mom was doing with her summer off, which was weird. He'd never wondered that before. His parents had always been right there.
He spent the next quarter hour fabricating answers to his mom's questions about the camp, while telling her the truth about how he was feeling.
Never in a million years would he have thought that he would miss home once he actually managed to escape. But he did. He really did. He didn't want to run back that moment or anything, but it would be nice to drop in for a day.
But he had managed to escape. It hadn't taken him until university. He'd managed to do it this summer and that made him happier than anything else. Here he was, actually living on his own, away from home, with a bunch of people he'd never met before coming here. It didn't seem like a big difference when he was going about his day, heck he hardly thought about it, but sitting here, he was reminded how nervous he'd been that first day to be living with a roommate, how nervous he was to be at a different school in a different city.
Christ, how far he'd come.
Across campus, a trickle of people flowed out of the Production Building.
Jacob jumped to his feet and got dressed. There wasn't another moment to waste in lamentation. He booked a training room for an hour from now. Until then he'd try that meditation Camilla had shown him.
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The rest of the week passed in a blur. Brother Bondar hadn't made contact with them, and while Jacob read the entire chapter on Ritual Magic in Magical Absorption later that first day, the killer and the magic slid to the back of his mind. Camilla managed to sneak the book back into Muesli's office once all three of them had looked it over.
Training for his match took precedent, and in between sessions for that, he went to class and studied for midterms. He grumbled that having midterms the next Monday disadvantaged the people still in the Tournament, but if that was the price he had to pay for wanting to win, so be it.
In Production Basics they were learning how to cast wards, so he made sure he attended the next class on Thursday.
In Consumption Basics they were continuing to strengthen their resilience spells, time which he ended up using for practicing casting both resilience and perception.
In Decomposition Basics they were learning techniques for believing they could change the world around them, which was pretty useless, so he ended up skipping.
His own Production saw a marked increase, and while it wasn't as automatically facile as his Consumption spells were, he was finding it easier and easier to cast fire and force spells, but was it going to be enough for Archie?